ABSTRACT
Academic women in sociology, anthropology, psychology, English, comparative literature, and history who were learning to examine their disciplines from an entirely new and feminist perspective were neglecting or dismissing psychoanalysis as retrograde and conservative. Like all social movements, American feminism tried to get a foothold in the population at large. The handful of Freudian feminists who tried to prove their usefulness to the feminist movement were fighting an uphill battle. Most feminist scholarship was based on investigations of liberation through new lifestyles and leaned on radical premises rather than on Marx-Freud syntheses. Advocates of lesbianism turned out to be much friendlier to S. Freud than the run-of-the-mill heterosexual feminists. The handful of Freudian feminists who tried to prove their usefulness to the feminist movement were fighting an uphill battle. In one of the best, early collections, Toward a Sociology of Women, Alice Rossi's "Sex Equality: The Beginnings of Ideology" has just one reference to Freud.
